January 03, 2008

It doesn't seem like that's possible: the last time I voted was in 1980, when I worked on John Anderson's campaign as an undergrad and Independent at the University of Buffalo.

Turn around and 27 years have gone by. How do you lose a couple-three decades? In politics, you basically give up, stop believing. As the years go by, you lose hope, see that the country your child stands to inherit has turned into a place you are very close to running away from. Because it is ugly and doesn't resemble you or your family or anything you even remotely believe in. Because it doesn't feel like home.

Two weeks ago I made a decision to try again. At the public library, I registered to vote.

This will be my first election in nearly 30 years. I will vote for Barack Obama, the one candidate who I believe can help heal a couple of hundred years of trauma that America can't seem to get past.

I would like to be able to say to Jenna, "Yes, that is President Obama." I will not vote Republican, even if that means I have to vote for Hillary.

Lots of things have kept me from registering to vote over the past couple of decades -- from complete lack of faith in the process to moral resistance to the endemic immorality of politics. And lots of other reasons too.

But before I give up on America and the democratic process for the next 27 years, I will try to stand up for change again. I will volunteer. I will donate. And I will vote.

If you haven't voted in a few elections, come along with me. Let's look ahead and suspend our disbelief, even if just for this next year, to see if we can make a difference. To see if it is possible to change course.

December 30, 2007

I recently jumped into a Twitter discussion between Shel Israel and Guy Kawasaki, both of whom I follow (I'm currently not following Guy for the reasons referenced in this post, but maybe he'll cut down the Truemors links and the bother-value ratio will improve; then I'd follow him again.

The reason for my popping into Shel's comment to Guy was that I agreed with Shel about the annoyance factor from the inordinate number of tweets (oh lord i hate that word) Guy posts that are nothing more than links to mainstream news stories on Guy's business site, Truemors.

PLUS there's already a Truemors feed on Twitter -- you can see the same stories that Guy references by following Truemors.

Guy's honest response, and I respect it, is just don't follow me then. But the increasing number of bot-like TINYURL links that take me to places I don't give a crap about is diluting the value of twitter. Twitter, if nothing else, is hyper-current. Linking to yesterday's news and pretending you are sharing it because you care is like littering. It's careless and ugly to look at.For further reflection, here's the basic conversation from our twitter debate over "link spam" on twitter...

...all of which begs the question: should we be trying to control conversation on twitter or should we be participating in conversations that develop organically on twitter. Sure, there is room for both. For everything. Twitter is wide open if you can fit wide open in two lines of text. But spamming me continual links to mainstream news stories that I can see on 10 other sites is not talking to me, it's not engaging me. IT'S YOUR FACE WITH A BOT DOING THE WORK

It's broadcast, old boss-new boss, it's like metametaspam - you have a site that aggregates news from other sites and then you aggregate it again for me in a feed I subscribe to expecting to hear from you.

Maybe I'm expecting too much of the Twitter crowd. And maybe that's why blogging still gives me what I need.